#v: like real people do;

[lazylittledragon]

ok someone please correct me if i'm wrong but am i weird for thinking those 'audiobooks don't count as reading' posts are ableist as fuck????

[pixlokita]

Art trade/ collab with @cookieruma29 ‧⁺◟( ᵒ̴̶̷̥́ ·̫ ᵒ̴̶̷̣̥̀ ) 💖 I Drew her Evan and mine meeting and she colored it super pretty as always

[remma-demma]

I’m actually scared of alienating some of my followers and moots with all the trans discourse I’ve been steeping quietly in and contemplating, but… I’m trying to not let being scared shut me up about this. That, in and of itself, is erasure and silencing.

Fuck staying quiet. Trans men and mascs deserve a voice, and we, as a group, are not oppressing or invalidating anyone else by using that voice. (Obviously there are shithead exceptions!! Anyone can be an asshole.)

I really hope that if I ever speak about any of this in the future, that people recognize that it’s not ever, ever trans femininity as a concept I have an issue with. It’s people who

- try to divide the community

- are reinventing gender essentialism from the ground up but make it trans

-police other people’s identities and decide for them what oppression they must face because of a tiny set of superficial traits

- simply. Don’t understand what intersectionality means.

- disregard and invalidate anyone who doesn’t fit a very specific (binary, rich, white, abled, flawlessly passing) idea of what it means to be trans.

None of those things are specific or exclusive to one identity. There just happens to be a community of transfems who are currently espousing many of these ideas as gospel. They are understandably defensive because of real actual transmisogyny they face. But other trans people are not your enemy. Accusing anyone and everyone who tries to point these flaws out as radical transmisogynists is simply not true. Pointing out bigotry is not bigotry in itself.

I don’t want the trans community to constantly be at each other’s throats. We each have to sit down and think if we ever catch ourselves blaming an entire other marginalized group for our issues. That’s just fascism babes.

[chiropteracupola]

an assortment of my temeraireverse fic-dragons!

[cygnet and honoré are from fifteenth-century britain and france, aquilillus, flavia magna, and bán are from second-century britain, and cipachcoatzin is from sixteenth-century mesoamerica]

[fishandships]

I can imagine Andrew’s hands being really rough and calloused to the point that he feels sort of bad about it. Like he wants to hold hands but feels his hands aren’t gentle enough—

YES YES YOU READ MY MIND this comes up a lot in my many. many WIPs. *cough* but The Hand Touch is REALLY important with this couple, but Andrew is hesitant for this exact reason and Rosario reads this as a boundary so they don't try to initiate, and so much needless pining ensues. but of course Rosario doesn't mind in the slightest, since they're so touch-starved themself, and despite his hands being so rough Andrew is so gentle

i think about this constantly tbh it's so good i like to mention this detail in writing like his callouses catching on Rosario's skin when he touches them, or them tracing all the lines and scars.......can you tell i'm obsessed with Hand Touches asldkfjsdf

[hotvintagepoll]

Oh no I missed coffee night!!!!

I wanted to ask you about Hitchcock 😔 If you're willing to answer, which movies of his do you think are overrated and which do you think are actually good? He's my most watched director (because film school) but I only genuinely like a few of his films and always disagreed with my classmates about which ones were the best

I feel like I'm holding up a Daffy Duck style sign that says "shoot me" because Hitchcock is so well thought of by cinephiles versus me, the basic horny mod who watches movies with hot people in them. With that said, I remember Rope, Dial M for Murder, North by Northwest, and To Catch a Thief all left me a bit flat, because I felt like he was prioritizing pushing technical limits or creating extravagant images over deeper characters and relationships. I love a good technical limit-pushing, but it needs to serve the story! And sometimes I feel like he has an idea he wants to try or an image he wants to show and puts so much focus on developing it that characters' reality and interest kind of falls by the wayside—they become pawns navigating his situations, instead of interesting characters in their own right.

To be fair, this is more a characteristic of his later work than his early work—The Lady Vanishes is one of my favorite movies, and I remember Notorious and Spellbound both being enjoyable when I watched them a few years ago. Again, basic film watcher here. Don't show this post to the Criterion collection.

[pumpkinrootbeer]

i do think it is legitimately very funny whenever someone tries to make the claim that lavabending is inherently a very slow subbending and therefore not good in a fight. specifically when using that argument against Bolin's skill as a bender.

Sure, I feel like in very specific instances with Ghazan that could be a fair argument to make. It takes him a moment to destabilize the Ba Sing Se wall and for him to kick up enough lava to destroy the airbending temple. (to the point I would argue that if Bolin had been versed in lavabending like he was in s4 he would have swept the ground with Ghazan), but in moments where he's actually in a fight his lava is incredibly quick.

Just the lava frisbee on its own is an incredibly quick move

But making that argument with Bolin in particular is absolutely batshit when outside of lavabending he is an incredibly quick fighter. I would say it is one of, if not the, most defining things about his fighting style. He moves very, very quickly and uncharacteristically agile for a earthbender. This is a known thing. Like

I am not the first person to say this but no other earthbender does backflips like he does. And THEN with lavabending he is just as quick if not more so

Bolin since season 1 has had an uncanny knack for bending incredibly fast, and his lavabending is no exception to that rule. It's honestly something that haunts my brain all the time because how quick he is with it low-key breaks the balancing? a little?? Like earthbending was always shown to be very strong but in turn it was slower than other types of bending, but with Bolin that doesn't really seem to be a hangup he has.

[sleepymick]

maybe a hot take, but kev and v are also partially responsible for what happened to liam that night that he overdosed, and both the show and shameless fans don’t acknowledge this anywhere near enough imo. obviously, fiona is liam’s legal guardian, so a very large portion of that responsibility 100% falls on her, but as mentioned, i don’t see enough shameless fans talking about how both kev and v were grown adults also recklessly doing lines of cocaine in a house with a literal toddler. there was not enough awareness of the environment for how hard they were partying, and v even admits to this shortly after. that’s the only bit of accountability that we see either of them take, and if i remember correctly, the guilt that’s displayed/written is surface level, and it’s a fairly brief scene. there’s not even an exchange of apologies between the two of them and fiona once she’s out. like, if this were a situation that were to actually happen, i know people that would be so pissed off at kev and v, they’d be ready to throw hands tbh because again….they were grown adults also recklessly doing lines of cocaine in a house with a literal toddler. you are partially responsible.

[girderednerve]

Low quality books that appear to be AI generated are making their way into public libraries via their digital catalogs, forcing librarians who are already understaffed to either sort through a functionally infinite number of books to determine what is written by humans and what is generated by AI, or to spend taxpayer dollars to provide patrons with information they don’t realize is AI-generated.

With Hoopla, librarians have to opt into Hoopla’s entire catalog, then pay for whatever their customers choose to borrow from that catalog. The only way librarians can limit what Hoopla books their customers can borrow is by setting a limit on the price of books. For example, a library can use Hoopla but make it so their customers can only borrow books that cost the library $5 per use.

“Investigating these authors, their book covers, their social media, etc takes A LOT OF TIME, especially with the volume of questionable material increasing month to month (and that's not including the sheer amount of legitimate books published each month in adult fiction that I'm looking at),” one librarian who asked to remain anonymous so she could talk openly about her job, told me. “Is it the best use of my time doing this work on top of my other duties when customers may or may not care? And with the rising multitudes of AI generated content, will there come a point where it just ‘is what it is?’”

This type of low quality, AI generated content, is what we at 404 Media and others have come to call AI slop. Librarians, whose job it is in part to curate what books their community can access, have been dealing with similar problems in the publishing industry for years, and have a different name for it: vendor slurry. While the term now encompasses what seems like AI-generated content as well, it predates the rise of generative AI, and also refers to the glut of low quality, often self-published ebooks or book “summaries” that are common on Hoopla. As some librarians told me, the sheer quantity of books in Hoopla’s service makes it seem more valuable because it offers such a large number of books, but in reality that number is misleadingly inflated by this slurry.

Several of the librarians I talked to said that they are worried about discussing [the problems raised by Hoopla's weak, unclear selection policies, including the 2022 inclusion of explicitly white nationalist texts,] because of the growing hostility towards libraries and groups like Moms for Liberty demanding that books about LGBTQ rights, race, and ethnicity be removed from libraries. One the one hand, librarians want to curate their collections and make sure their patrons are getting access to quality information. On the other hand, they don’t want people to think that they are trying to censor what materials patrons can access in way that’s comparable to what organizations like Moms for Liberty want. None of the librarians I talked to suggested the AI-generated content needed to be banned from Hoopla and libraries only because it is AI-generated. It might have its place, but it needs to be clearly labeled, and more importantly, provide borrowers with quality information.

[citadelrock]

(don't fear) the reaper into temperance is canon change my mind

[prettybbychim]

i can count on one hand the amount of female characters in this game that have made me stop and stare but damn She. stunning i’m in love

[dellephone]

post-apocalypse + landoscar

Oscar has to rendezvous with Mark in an hour when he runs into someone in the run-down convenience store. They stare at each other for a moment, both on edge, neither keen to make the first move. The other boy is attractive— he looks about the same age, although he could probably use a good shower. Oscar imagines he's in a similar state. A good zombie apocalypse will do that to a man.

The other boy tilts his head, eyes the gun on Oscar's back. Says, "Find anything good?"

Why would he answer that truthfully? Oscar shakes his head no. “You?"

The guy flashes a crooked smile. "Me?"

Oscar doesn't respond, keeps his expression unimpressed. Although his cheeks feel a bit warmer. They both fall silent for a moment, still neither moving to leave. Oscar's the next to speak. It's his turn, or something. "You based near here?" Almost kicks himself for such a stupid question.

The boy's eyes narrow. He shrugs, "It's all nearby in the grand scheme of things, right?"

"Right," well. That's about the kind of answer he expected, albeit a bit stupider.

"You?"

Oscar feels a smile twitch at the edge of his mouth. "Not really." Oscar looks away, starts feeling the itch to leave. Would have already, if he was smarter. And less. Curious. Or something. "Well," Oscar shifts his feet. "I've got," gestures one arm toward the door, "you know."

It's quiet for a moment, the other boy nods before blurting, "I'm Lando." Then winces. At telling an unknown his name or the whole awkward encounter.

Oscar, still half ready to leave, settles slightly back, "Oscar."

"Nice name."

"Thanks. You too, Lando," tastes the name on his tongue, wonders how familiarity would change it. Remembers not to dwell on unnecessary things.

It's quiet for another moment. Oscar isn't foolish enough to stick around any longer. "Maybe I'll see you. Around."

"Yeah," the boy Lando nods. Stays put. Watches Oscar as he leaves.

Later, when he meets with Mark at the rendezvous, Oscar conveniently forgets to mention that he ran into someone. And told them his name.

[welcometoteyvat]

as a chinese person yall need to stop blaming the ccp for everything (read: hoyo is capable of making colorist design decisions and not everything is a result of censorship pls)

[rat-spit-village]

.

[syntheticspades]

so people editing harvey to too sweet... he feels more like a like real people do kinda guy

[fishandships]

Pocky Day~ they're too shy to play the Pocky Game, but happy to share the treats anyway!

(thank you so much to everyone who voted in the poll to see which ship i would draw today. genuinely your participation and interest mean so much to me ily 💚)